The Mercies

by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

There are ways words fall down: they give shape too easily, carelessly.

Grief cannot feed you, though it fills you.

little impact as snow falling in the sea.

And because they will use his customs for naming, she is Mistress Absalom Cornet. Herself, lost inside his name.

Brutishness made palatable by touches of fineness and manners.

They are a language, Maren. Just because you do not speak it doesn’t make it devilry.”

Referring to runes

“If she floats, they will say she is a witch. They say water is pure and repels the Devil, and so those who float are witches.”

“These seats are so damnably uncomfortable,” she says by way of greeting, after they have curtsied to each other and settled back down on the pew. “I should have brought a cushion.” Ursa is saved from making conversation by the arrival of two more women, Fru Mogensdatter and Fru Edisdatter, both older than Christin, who are the wives of Commissioner Danielsson from Kirkenes, and Commissioner Andersson from Kunes.

its like an execution is a social gathering

she did, on Christmas Eve sixteen-seventeen, fly to the witches’ mountain of Ballvollen and there knot a cloth with five others, and set the storm that drowned forty men, her own husband among them—”

The lies and fantasy that are judge and jury, and cause murderous violence remind me of the current day, Qnon which has the possibility of being as much or more deadly

This story is about people, and how they lived; before why and how they died became what defined them.

The last sentence of the afterward speaks volumes.Yet, it negates to share the heart of why their deaths, "defined them". The echoes of life in 1617, on a small island in Finnland-Norway live on in, “The Mercies”. A kings desperation to leave his mark, caused the the ethnic cleansing of the Sami, and the deaths of some Norwegian men, and many Norwegian women, disguised by the fantasy of witchcraft.